There is pressure to cast doubt on the validity of witnesses to child abuse.

Ralph Underwager presented himself as a child abuse expert, now discredited. He said that abuse was God's will.

Another cod expert was the American psychiatrist Richard Gardner, who put forward the Parental Alienation Syndrome which tried to invalidate all claims by a child that s/he was abused by one parent as due to undue influence of the alienated parent.

A related syndrome, also not accepted by the psychiatric community, is the False Memory Syndrome which tries to invalidate all memory of child sex abuse.

Interestingly, Sigmund Freud's initial findings that much neurosis was caused by child sex abuse stirred us such opposition that he later modified his views to talk of 'screen memories', which were less real.